Working From Home? Here’s How AWS Can Help

Just a few weeks and so much has changed. Old ways of living, working, meeting, greeting, and communicating are gone for a while. Friendly handshakes and warm hugs are not healthy or socially acceptable at the moment.

My colleagues and I are aware that many people are dealing with changes in their work, school, and community environments. We’re taking measures to support our customers, communities, and employees to help them to adjust and deal with the situation, and will continue to do more.

Working from Home
With people in many cities and countries now being asked to work or learn from home, we believe that some of our services can help to make the transition from the office or the classroom to the home just a bit easier. Here’s an overview of our solutions:

Amazon WorkSpaces lets you launch virtual Windows and Linux desktops that can be accessed anywhere and from any device. These desktops can be used for remote work, remote training, and more.

Amazon WorkDocs makes it easy for you to collaborate with others, also from anywhere and on any device. You can create, edit, share, and review content, all stored centrally on AWS.

Amazon Chime supports online meetings with up to 100 participants (growing to 250 later this month), including chats and video calls, all from a single application.

Amazon Connect lets you set up a call or contact center in the cloud, with the ability to route incoming calls and messages to tens of thousands of agents. You can use this to provide emergency information or personalized customer service, while the agents are working from home.

Amazon AppStream lets you deliver desktop applications to any computer. You can deliver enterprise, educational, or telemedicine apps at scale, including those that make use of GPUs for computation or 3D rendering.

AWS Client VPN lets you set up secure connections to your AWS and on-premises networks from anywhere. You can give your employees, students, or researchers the ability to “dial in” (as we used to say) to your existing network.

AWS Chatbot lets you monitor and interact with your AWS resources in Slack channels and Chime chat rooms.

AWS IQ can help you to locate the expertise that will allow you to stand up and scale remote work initiatives.

Some of these services have special offers designed to make it easier for you to get started at no charge; others are already available to you under the AWS Free Tier. You can learn more on the home page for each service, on our new Remote Working & Learning page, and in Work from Home Offer for Amazon WorkSpaces.

You can sign up for and start using these services without talking to us, but we are here to help if you need more information or need some help in choosing the right service(s) for your needs. Here are some points of contact:

• Public Sector – Live Chat.
• General – Contact Us / Live Chat.

If you are already an AWS customer, your Technical Account Manager (TAM) and Solutions Architect (SA) will be happy to help. You can also reach out to AWS Support via a Support Case if you have an urgent need.

Some Useful Content
I am starting a collection of other AWS-related content that will help you use these services and work-from-home as efficiently as possible. Here’s what I have so far:

• Best Practices for Remote Work Using Amazon Chime.
• How to live-stream Meetups on Twitch Without any Special Equipment.
• Quickly Set up Remote Contact Center Agents with Amazon Connect.
• How to Build an Online Learning Platform that Engages and Educates Students at Scale with Amazon Kendra, Amazon Comprehend, Amazon Translate, and More.
• Getting Started with Jitsi – An Open Source Web Conferencing Solution.
• New Offers to Enable Work from Home from Amazon WorkSpaces and Amazon WorkDocs.
• How to use AWS Educate Classroom to Replace the Physical Lab for Online Teaching.
• AWS Cloud Lab – One more Real AWS Educational Use Case Part 1.
• Hero Tips of Using AWS for Online Teaching.
• AWS Launches Initiative to Accelerate COVID-19 Diagnostics, Research, and Testing.
• Hero Tips of Using Amazon Chime for Online Teaching.
• Managed AWS Educate Classroom.
• Building a Scalable Outbound Call Engine Using Amazon Connect and Amazon Lex.

If you create something similar, share it with me and I’ll add it to my list.

Please Stay Tuned
This is, needless to say, a dynamic and unprecedented situation and we are all learning as we go.

I do want you to know that we’re doing our best to help. If there’s something else that you need, please do not hesitate to reach out. Go through your normal AWS channels first, but contact me if you are in a special situation and I’ll do my best!

— Jeff;